3D Tape Backup Biz Taps Mr. StorageTek

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By Chris Mellor • Get more from this author

The guy who guided StorageTek when it developed and shipped its StreamLine tape library, who persevered through Sun’s ownership of StorageTek, and then wound up in Oracle, which depends on StreamLine to this day for tape credibility, has finally taken a hike. He’s joined SpectraLogic.

Privately owned Spectra, with its T-Finity, is the only supplier of high-end enterprise libraries outside Oracle and IBM. It is driving forward in an Active Archive alliance, positioning tape libraries as the best value archival storage for cloud service providers and longer-term big data storage, and just waiting as former disk bigots realise just how dumb it is to archive petabytes and exabytes of data on spinning platters.

We understand from W Curtis Preston that Spectra will announce another high-profile hiring tomorrow. We also understand it’s added colour to its tape management system, and also a touch screen, both thought to be a rarity in tape-land. It is adding built-in encryption to its library products as well as built-in partitioning and is the first library manufacturer to use the z-axis.

Preston says: “If x is up/down, y is side/side, z is front/back (i.e. storing tapes deeper than 1 per slot).” In other words tape library cartridge density and thus slot count gets increased. Tweeters suggest the T-Finity gets good scalability from this; such as 26 racks and 31,820 slots. They also tweet Spectra is growing revenues at 28 per cent year-on-year, helped by orders such as one from NASA for a four-exabyte tape system.

SpectraLogic has not yet issued a press release about new product features, and this information comes from reputable sources at a SpectraLogic analysts’ day session in Boulder. ®

This article originally appeared in The Register. It appears here in its entirety as part of a cross-publishing agreement.